Miles Davis and the track name mix-up on Kind Of Blue

Kind Of Blue - the best selling jazz record of all time - had one major flaw. The names of the tracks on side two of the vinyl record were wrongly named. 

Despite plenty of evidence to resolve the mystery, recent commentary on the album track names continues to muddy the waters. 

Side two of Kind Of Blue had two tracks - All Blues and Flamenco Sketches. Bill Evans, who played piano on the sessions - and was composer and arranger on some tracks - wrote the original sleeve notes to the album. In summary he gave a short description of each track by turn, referring to Flamenco Sketches ahead of All Blues. Original versions of the album had the names of the tracks thus, with Flamenco Sketches as the first track on side two.

Early version, track names in the wrong order

Evans' original handwritten sleeve notes describe Flamenco Sketches as "a six-eight, twelve measure blues"  and All Blues as "a series of five scales, each played as long as the soloist wishes."

Somewhere along the line, soon after the album came out in the US in 1959, the track names were transposed, but the tracks on the actual record stayed the same. It's not clear why the change was made or by whom, but the most likely explanation is that it became clear to those closest to the sessions (including Miles and Bill Evans) that the sleeve notes were wrong.

Evans said in an interview that "Flamenco Sketches was something that Miles and I did together that morning before the date. I went by his apartment and he had liked Peace Piece that I did, and he said he’d like to do that." 

So we know that Flamenco Sketches is the last track on the record, because it's the one that starts like Peace Piece. What is less clear is why Evans described Flamenco Sketches as a blues in 6/8, which it isn't. All Blues, however, is in 6/8 time.

Successive generations have misidentified the two songs. This is surprising, because even if they were not trained musicians, it should be apparent that the tracks, as described by Bill Evans in the record's liner notes, are not as they appear on the record. 

Coltrane, Adderley, Miles and Bill Evans

The magazine Jazzwise published an interesting appraisal of the Kind of Blue sessions earlier this year, but their comment that "the blues in 6/8, called either ‘All Blues’ or ‘Flamenco Sketches,’ depending on who you believe" tells you a lot about the ongoing confusion, 60 years after the fact. The magazine's piece doesn't provide a clear answer either way.

In his acclaimed biography on the making of Kind of Blue, Ashley Khan quotes the revised notes as coming from Evans' original sleeve, which is wrong, but at least Khan stuck with the corrected track names - All Blues first, Flamenco Sketches second.

Amy Herot's sleevenotes to the 1990s Mastersound Edition of Kind Of Blue got it right, stating that in 1959, the label copy was corrected to All Blues followed by Flamenco Sketches. More recent releases have also corrected Evans' original notes. 

The Mastersound version in 1992 was also the first to correct a pitch error on the master tape. Columbia's recording policy at the time was to run two tape machines simultaneously, a master and a safety. Apparently, the master tape was running slow. As a result, the tracks on side one were about a quarter tone sharp. According to producer Teo Macero, this was not intentional. 

The session tapes indicate that every take used for the album was the first complete take of that composition. I have recently bought an anniversary edition of the vinyl record, which comes as a double album with an alternate take of 'Flamenco Sketches' and a great version of On Green Dolphin Street, recorded prior to the Kind of Blue sessions (and previously available on the CD of Some Day My Prince Will Come) with the legendary line-up of Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. They sound amazing.

Original video of So What, from the Kind Of Blue sessions:

See also on this blog:

Miles Davis at the Isle of Wight festival, 1970

A tribute to jazz giant Chick Corea